1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to the field of data processing. More particularly, the present invention relates to a system and a method for querying contact information.
2. Description of Related Art
Means of communication between people have become more abundant with the development of communication technology. Traditional voice telephones, video telephones, cell phones, network phones, email services, instant messages, short message services and others are among the various existing communication means which use different communication tools which involve different contact information. For example, when an email communication means is used an email transceiver application and an email address are required and when a cell phone is used cell phone numbers are required as contact information.
People will encounter various contacts as communication means become increasingly abundant. This phenomenon is apparent in large-scale multinational corporations. In a global enterprise, the actual geographical location of staff may no longer be important, whereas staff members might not know where a colleague is located but know how to contact each other. For example, enterprise staffs communicate internally and externally via means of email service, instant messaging applications, telephone services, fax services, and various carrier services.
Contacts of a company's staff member can include colleagues, classmates, friends, relatives, clients and other types of contacts. There may also be repetition among contacts of these types. For example, staff member Alice may be both a classmate and a colleague of staff member Bob. Additionally, information on these contacts is typically not kept unchanged but rather varying. For example, an email address, a cell phone number, or traditional telephone number may change. When a user attempts to contact a desired contact according to a maintained address list, the existing contact information may be obsolete.
Responsibilities of staff members in large-scale multinational environments change dynamically over time. For example, a user might not know the email address of each staff member or relationships among staff members because the company's organization structure may have changed. Therefore, a common practice is to query contact information in the latest enterprise address list other than in the address list maintained by each individual staff member, thereby guaranteeing the acquisition of updated contact information.
Email systems and address list tools are typically independent one of each another. Therefore, users may query contact information on an unknown contact(s) from different tools, as shown in FIG. 1. For example, an email system and an instant messaging system are usually employed in an enterprise, and an enterprise address list is used as a contact information memory system. Referring to FIG. 1, a method 100 is shown for acquiring contact information.
FIG. 1 illustrates a method for looking up contact information of unknown contacts. A schematic enterprise address list interface 110 is illustrated in FIG. 1. For example, when a user wants to carbon copy (“CC”) an email to personnel under the management of Tom through an email system 130 and wants to add information on personnel under the management of Tom to the field of new contacts of an instant messaging system 120, he/she can perform the following operations: open the interface of the enterprise address list and find Tom's personal information; find names of personnel (e.g. Alice and Bob) under the management of Tom from “personnel under the management” and find corresponding email addresses; and manually enter email addresses of these persons to a “CC” field 132 of the email system 130 through copy/paste operation and enter the information to a new contact field 122 of the instant messaging application 120. Lookup and copy/paste of email addresses is a time-consuming task when a user needs to send an email to each of multiple contacts. For example, sending an email to each of all employees of a “manager” in an enterprise would be a complex task.
Sending an email to a particular contact A with an unknown email address and “CC” this email to unknown contacts B and C having a particular relationship with the contact A is quite common. For example, contact B is the manager of A, and contact C is the assistant of the manager of A.